LIFE
Tue 12 July 16
21
Fleadh People
Dennis Liddy: Nostalgia Man
Newmarket native Denis Liddy first went to the Fleadh as a youngster in 1977, when the festival came to Ennis for a second time.
He tells Stuart Holly about the ‘hooley’ that ensued and how he can’t wait for this August.
FLEADH Cheoil Na hEireann 2016 is just
over four weeks away and by the time the
first accordion button is pushed and the first
banjo string is plucked, more than €1 million
will have been injected into the world-famous
festival to get the show on the road.
Rewind 39 years, to the last time the
Fleadh was hosted in Ennis, the budget was
IR£10,000 — oh how things have changed.
One fixture which will remain the same,
however, is the presence of Newmarket-on-Fergus native Denis Liddy.
When Denis spoke to The Clare People
yesterday, he had just returned to Ennis after a
week at the Willie Clancy Festival — his 34th
out of the 35 that have been staged — and was
speaking about his excitement about being
involved in the 2016 Fleadh.
For Denis, like many other musicians in the
area, things have come full circle as his first
experience of the Fleadh was when it came to
Ennis for a second time in 1977.
Denis — a primary school teacher in Barefield who was also a leading member of the
famed Turloughmore Céilí Band from Ennis
— said that things have changed a whole lot
since ‘77 when the town had to be boarded up,
such was the hooley that ensued on the town’s
streets.
He recounts, “My first Fleadh was in Ennis
in 1977, my dad was treasurer of the Fleadh
Committee on a budget of £10,000.
“Myself and Mary my sister, who’s also a
teacher in Tulla, the two of us were basically
conscripted into selling stickers at the door
and running into the competitions, back out
to the door and into the next competition, that
kind of thing. That was my first experience of
an All-Ireland Fleadh, and I’ve been to every
one since.
“The first difference between then and now
is the clientele in that time. It was more of a
hooley at that time, there was more drinking
going on. I remember the main street was
boarded up due to the amount of sheer lunacy
that was going on.”
Fiddle player Denis, the eldest of a family
of eight, reveals that there’s much more of a
family atmosphere at the Fleadh these days,
with gig rigs and fringe events going on alongside the competitions in the Dome at the Fair
Green and sessions in the streets.
“It’s much more of a festival than just Irish
music and that certainly brings in its own
crowd, but not what I would call a traditional
music crowd, it adds an awful lot of interest of
Denis Liddy
the culture for sure,” he adds.
Denis comes from a family steeped in
traditional music with a huge involvement in
Comhaltas. His mother and father were both
teachers and Denis reveals that he and his
siblings were introduced to music through the
school system.
“We got involved in a Comhaltas branch in
Cratloe and we started playing music with our
friends in primary school and then it evolved
into a sesiún group in Cois Na hAibheanna
which opened in ‘82 or ‘83 and we started
going to things like the Willie Clancy week
very early on.
“And next thing I ended up on a fiddle,
trying to learn from older people in the area,
like Fergus McTaggert in particular and we
started doing little trips here and there like to
Scotland and Germany which was a big deal
for us in the mid 80s. So it was a really nice
outlet and meeting friends continuously year
after year and having people staying over for
Fleadh Nua certainly had a huge social effect
on our lives.”
And Denis has taken this musical legacy forward with his own family, who often crack out
the instruments to have a session in the living
room at home. Denis’s wife, a US native, along
with their two older children are all heavily
immersed in the music scene.
Denis says that the younger people in
competition are now playing at ‘a far higher
standard than I was at that stage’ and two such
competitors are his teenagers, Heidi (18) and
Brenn (15), who are entering the Fleadh in
groups.
His other two children — two-year-old
twins named Dearbhla and Muireann — are
almost ready to pick up their instruments too,
he laughs. A highlight of the Fleadh is sure
to be the show ‘1916- A Terrible Beauty’, of
which Denis is the musical director. The twohour show, taking place in glór on Thursday,
August 18, depicts the 1916 Rising through
musical depiction, narration and archival
footage of the Rising.
“It involves people like Sean Ó Sé, Edel
Vaughan and Tadhg Maher singing, and then
we have the commentators, Pat Costelloe and
Ciana Cambell and the director Ray Conway.
It’s a very unique, very beautiful show.”
Looking forward to this August when
400,000 people come to Clare, Denis laughs,
“It’ll be interesting to see how Ennis copes
with the sheer volume of people — I’m expecting the town to drop by about an inch.”